There are a number of sellers offering the same plan for roughly half price on eBay, $199 Buy It Now. Positive feedback for these sellers is close to 100% and, as AppleCare is a worldwide warranty, it seems like a smart move to buy from them, rather than from Apple. Read the auctions more closely and things start to sound a little fishy though. The majority of the sellers who sell a lot of AppleCare packages provide the serial number electronically, rather than providing the retail package or any official paperwork from Apple. Only the serial number is required to activate the warranty, but surely the retail package should be available, if requested? Although the serial number provided may activate the warranty, how do we know that it wasn’t generated by a serial number generator?

I think in this case I’m going to be more prudent and pay a little bit more to buy an AppleCare plan that comes in the proper retail package - there are a number of sellers on eBay offering them and they’re also available from a number of reputable online retailers. The prices aren’t as low, but at least I’ll be more comfortable that I’m buying a legitimate product.

For example:

[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ mount |grep home
/dev/mapper/data-home on /home type xfs (rw)
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ mkdir test
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ ls -ld test
drwxr-sr-x 2 mj mj 6 Jun 18 15:28 test
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ touch -t 200801011530 test
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ ls -ld test
drwxr-sr-x 2 mj mj 6 Jan 1 15:30 test
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ stat test
File: `test’
Size: 6 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: fd00h/64768d Inode: 951267331 Links: 2
Access: (2755/drwxr-sr-x) Uid: ( 1000/ mj) Gid: ( 1000/ mj)
Access: 2008-01-01 15:30:00.000000000 +0000
Modify: 2008-01-01 15:30:00.000000000 +0000
Change: 2008-06-18 15:29:08.173750666 +0100
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ mv test test1
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ ls -ld test1
drwxr-sr-x 2 mj mj 6 Jan 1 15:30 test1
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ mv test1 ..
[0] mj@majestic:~/tmp$ ls -ld ../test1
drwxr-sr-x 2 mj mj 6 Jun 18 15:30 ../test1
File: `../test1′
Size: 6 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: fd00h/64768d Inode: 951267331 Links: 2
Access: (2755/drwxr-sr-x) Uid: ( 1000/ mj) Gid: ( 1000/ mj)
Access: 2008-01-01 15:30:00.000000000 +0000
Modify: 2008-06-18 15:30:02.814078187 +0100
Change: 2008-06-18 15:30:02.814078187 +0100


I’d never seen this happen before, so I tried to reproduce the behaviour on systems using ext3, UFS and HFS+ filesystems. None of them updated the moved directory’s mtime when the parent directory changed, which is what one would expect. XFS does have an active mailing list, so I reported my findings and was quickly provided with a patch that fixed the problem. Kudos to the XFS developers for providing a fix so quickly.

Rather odd that no-one had spotted this behaviour in the past though…

As long as the fresh bootstrap is done using the same parameters as used originally (prefix, database directory, etc), everything should work as before.

I tested this a short while ago on an OS X 10.5 system using a pkgsrc -current tree and it worked perfectly.

Special meal requests cannot be made for travel on any of the following services: all UK Domestic flights, Euro Traveller flights from the UK to Paris, Luxembourg, Dusseldorf, Jersey, Cologne, Amsterdam & Brussels, and passengers travelling on any flight on a stand-by or waitlist basis.

That’s rather poor (and rather strange, if you ask me). Heck, in South Africa BA even have extra vegetarian meals on their domestic flights for those who haven’t requested them in advance. I’m not at all impressed, but unfortunately BA seem to be the only airline that fly from Gatwick to Manchester.

Update: If you ask, they do have vegetarian meals onboard, even if you can’t pre-book one.

For those in the area, we’re now living in Horley, Surrey (near Gatwick).

Something odd that we’ve both noticed is that when we put a 450Mhz CPU into a machine that we didn’t receive with a 450Mhz CPU, it wouldn’t boot up. There’s no mention of CPU speed jumpers in the service manual, so we both put it down to different motherboard revisions, phases of the moon and the lack of a chicken sacrifice.

A few days ago I discovered the Sun 450 MHz UltraSPARC-II Module Upgrade guide, which details the CPU speed jumper settings for the Ultra 60 (see pages 3-5 and 3-6). Bah. Why doesn’t Sun bother documenting these things in the service manual?

All mail for my various domains is delivered to the primary MX, which is a hosted server sitting in the US running Debian GNU/Linux (unfortunately my hosting provider doesn’t support NetBSD). It runs postfix and makes use of a variety of checks within postfix itself as well as postgrey for greylisting. I use a fairly conservative list of RBLs and, in conjunction with greylisting, they stop most spam from being accepted. Why postfix? Well, I stopped using sendmail over ten years ago, and although I’ve had good results with Exim in the past, these days I’m just most comfortable with postfix and it suits my needs perfectly.

The RBLs I use:

• zen.spamhaus.org
• cbl.abuseat.org
• list.dsbl.org

Once mail has been received by my primary MX, it is delivered to local mailboxes, one per user. None of the users read their mail from the US server, however. All the mail is downloaded to the local mail server via SSL-secured POP3 and accessed here, either locally or via IMAP. The local mail server is a Sun Ultra 2 running NetBSD/sparc64 3.1_STABLE.

Software I’m using on the local mail server:

• postfix
• dovecot for IMAP (over SSL) access. There are a number of IMAP/POP3 servers available, but I chose Dovecot because of its clean design, good security record and flexible support for mail storage, amongst other things.
• amavisd-new with spamassasin (with razor and Bayesian filtering enabled) and clamav for content filtering
• getmail to download mail from the US server
• mailgraph for simple reporting

All of the above are available in pkgsrc. As I have already done any RBL-based checks on the MX, I don’t do any of them locally.

Why pkgsrc and not ports on a FreeBSD system? Well, I have a finely tuned pkgsrc environment that builds packages with my set of defaults (MIT Kerberos support, for example), so I decided to stick with what works well for me.

My boot server is running NetBSD 3.1 and I booted FreeBSD 6.2, so if you’re using different software you may need to make some adjustments. YMMV.

1. On the boot server, configure rarpd(8) as usual, adding the entry for your machine’s MAC address to /etc/ethers. For example (for a machine called test02):
   08:00:20:b2:2f:b6 test02
2. Extract the FreeBSD base fileset to the appropriate location on your boot server (for example, /export/install/fb62_sp64).
3. Extract the FreeBSD GENERIC kernel fileset to boot/ in your diskless filesystem.
4. Within your diskless root, symlink boot/GENERIC to boot/kernel (boot/GENERIC is a directory that contains the kernel and its modules).
5. Put boot/loaders from the diskless filesystem into your tftp root directory and symlink it to your machine’s IP address in hex. For example, the filename for 192.168.1.92 is C0A8015C.
6. Export your diskless root filesystem via NFS and add the necessary dhcpd.conf stanza. For example:
host test02.pimp.org.za {
hardware ethernet 08:00:20:b2:2f:b6;
fixed-address 192.168.1.92;
option host-name "test02";
option root-path "/export/install/fb62_sp64";
}
7. Boot your machine - “boot net” from the PROM should do it.

A few tips:

• It’s normally a good idea to update the machine’s OpenBoot PROM to the latest release. Old PROMs often have subtle bugs.
• Extracting FreeBSD filesets is simple:
cat 6.2-RELEASE/base/base.* > /tmp/base.tar.gz
tar -xzvpf /tmp/base.tar.gz -C /export/install/fb62_sp4


Update: Fixed incorrect command to extract sets (thanks John Messenger!)

My plan is to put together at least two dual CPU machines, one running FreeBSD and another probably running OpenSolaris. *sigh* If only NetBSD supported SMP on 64-bit SPARC systems.

From #762910:

<Dave> Question: Is it "right" to stop registered sex offenders from registering on social networking sites?
<highvoltage> Dave: where do you register to become a sex offender?
* Vhata falls off his chair laughing
<Dave> highvoltage: at your local school...
<MrKen> Dave: No, that's where they hold the auditions


I’m MrKen…

My feeling is that Microsoft is trying to spread FUD and scare large firms
that are considering FOSS. Companies are going to be dissuaded from using
FOSS if there is a risk that they may have to pay unknown “future
royalties” because the software they’re using violates a Microsoft patent.

I wonder if this will all just mysteriously blow over in a few months,
without Microsoft ever having released the details of the patents
supposedly violated. By which time, of course, enough FUD will be spread in
the market, particularly amongst those who don’t fully understand FOSS,
that Microsoft will have achieved exactly what they wanted to with their
disinformation campaign.

For some reason, I thought it bore reprinting here. Yes, I do love a good conspiracy theory.